By when will LLM chess bots beat other engines? (Permanent)

Question

This market resolves each option as NO if the date passes and Kenshin9000 (or anyone) has not defeated stockfish with an LLM-based chess engine.

All remaining options resolve YES once an LLM-based engine defeats stockfish (or top engine).

My resolution criteria are more strict than Mira’s:

The LLM engine must have higher ELO than the latest stockfish (or whatever the top engine is at resolution time) at blitz timings with 99.9% confidence and be reproduced by 3+ people.

The LLM engine must not use another chess engine at runtime.

For the purposes of this market, Large Language Models are 100M+ parameter general-purpose generative text models. A fine-tune of an LLM is ok, but the model cannot be solely trained on chess data. An LLM-based engine may use search, but node evaluation must be performed by invoking the LLM on each node (similar to AlphaZero, which is a DNN+search).

The LLM engine and Stockfish will run on the same hardware with the same time controls. The testing hardware should be either a commodity desktop or equivalent to the TCEC or other popular chess software tournament standards.

Manifold Markets · Answer

Per Manifold Markets prediction market, 2050 or earlier, followed by 2100 or earlier and 2040 or earlier are most likely. See the market for live updates (117 traders, as of Mar 29, 2026).